It may seem odd for such a liminal figure to have become so thoroughly equated with a country often considered central to world affairs, whose leaders regularly refer to it as “the indispensable nation.” But the importance of the crossroads—and the poets and gods of the crossroads—is that they allow us to change, to escape, to emerge or disappear. In this sense, the United States is, perhaps above all else, a liminal territory. (“Is anything central?” asks John Ashbery in “The One Thing That Can Save America.”) When we think of Japan, we think of Mount Fuji; when we think of France, we think of the Eiffel Tower. Russia evokes the Winter Palace, India the Taj Mahal. But when we think of the United States, we see the Statue of Liberty: the sculpture that marks the threshold, the limen, as the Romans would have said. America, alone among nations, has as its most recognized symbol not one of its great buildings or natural features, but an invocation of its doorway. And a doorway, like a crossroads, is neither here nor there; it is a possibility. In the case of the Statue of Liberty, the doorway is even more striking because it was called forth not by the sculpture’s original conception (its designer, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, intended the figure to signify liberty shining outward from the United States to the rest of the world) but by a feature it acquired seventeen years after its October 1886 dedication. That feature was a poem, that most marginal of artistic productions, and it was inscribed on a bronze tablet that now rests inside the statue’s base. Here is the conclusion of “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This is the sort of grand vision of liminality that the United States often calls forth. We are the threshold nation, the American self-myth says, offering doorway after doorway, behind each of which lies a new beginning.

This may be true, or nearly true. But there is a quieter, yet no less persistent, corollary: Those who pass through those doors will one day lift their own small light in a yellow wood, where two roads diverge. And it will make all the difference.

Acknowledgments

Ann Godoff, my editor, has been the truest friend and ally this book could have hoped for. I’m grateful in addition to the following people at Penguin Press: Benjamin Platt, Barbara Campo, Matt Boyd, Will Palmer, Sarah Hutson, Yamil Anglada, and Colin Dickerman (now at Flatiron Books).

Betsy Lerner, my agent, guides all of my writing that reaches book form. That’s doubly true in this case, since this project was her inspiration.